Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The Battle for the future of the Internet

Since Khaz banned me from the Google Cloud Computing group back in September (a group I helped create). I've been a missing a cloud community where I could share my ideas. Recently my cloud computing interoperability group has started to take off and I finally have a community outlet for my ideas on cloud computing, standards and interoperability.

Thanks for all the great insights. I also agree the the last thing we need are standards. If we do this right the standards will organically emerge over time. My goals for a Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) are fairly simple, although my ambitions are much larger.

The mission is this: Cloud interoperability for the purposes of reducing cross cloud complexity.

I completely agree with Paul and others, let's not re-invent the wheel, boil the ocean, (insert your own metaphor) . Whether it's OWL, RDF, SNMP or whatever. We have a significant amount of material to use as the basis for what we're trying to accomplish.

We must focus on the core aspects of simplicity, extensibility and scalability / decentralization in looking at this opportunity.

In regards to whether or not XMPP is powerful enough would at this point seems somewhat secondary. I'd use TCP as an analogy for our dilemma. TCP is arguable not the most scalable, secure or efficient protocol. But in it's simplicity was its ultimate advantage. The Internet works because it can fail dramatically without affecting the Internet at large, this is because of a decentralized fault tolerant architecture. An architecture that assumes failure. There are numerous messaging platforms and protocols to choose from, but none of which seem to address decentralization and extensibility to the extent that XMPP does. Is XMPP perfect? Probably not, but for our purposes it's more then adequate.

I envision a communication protocol that takes into consideration a future that may be vastly different then today's Internet landscape. In someways my ambitions for UCI is to enable a global computing environment that was never previously possible. A technology landscape where everything and anything is web enabled.

Yes, I have big ambitions, it is not often we find ourselves in the midst of a true paradigm shift. This is our opportunity to lose.

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Reuven Cohen ~ @ruv

An instigator, part time provocateur, bootstrapper, amateur cloud lexicographer, and purveyor of random thoughts, 140 characters at a time.

Reuven is an early innovator in the cloud computing space as the founder of Toronto based Enomaly in 2004 (Acquired by Virtustream in 2012). Enomaly was among the first to develop a self service infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform (ECP) circa 2005. As well as SpotCloud (2011) the first commodity style cloud computing Spot Market.

Today he leads Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) world wide advocacy efforts with a particular focus on increasing the volume, reach and influence of Citrix's extensive portfolio of technology solutions used by more than 260,000 customers and 100 million end users across the globe.

Reuven writes "The Digital Provocateur" column for Forbes Magazine, he is the co-founder of CloudCamp (100+ Cities around the Globe) CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas and is the largest of the ‘barcamp’ style of events. He is also the co-host of the DigitalNibbles Podcast sponsored by Intel